Breaking Ground: Doing things differently in artist development.
“Just thank you, this was absolutely the kind of project I needed to be a part of, and I'm feeling incredibly energised and excited for what lies ahead, especially having these tools and a better sense of what I want and where I'm going. I'm glad I trusted my instincts and signed up.”
- Theatre-maker and Breaking Ground participant 2021
Breaking Ground: How can artists have more productive and rewarding careers?
An ever-present, existential question for most artists. As an actor working in the arts for 20 years I've lived with this question in a visceral way, most of us do. I've done my best to embrace this question and continue to work to find my own answers. Over the course of my career I've seen artists grow in amazing ways through the process of answering it, but I’ve also seen too many suffer and become overwhelmed by it.
Too often there’s a sense that the answer to this comes down to elements out of our control and that ultimately career progression in the arts is a matter of luck or determinism; “If it’s meant to happen, it will”. However this is rarely a belief given much air in other industries in regard to professional development. So, what might we be missing in the arts, what can be learned from other industries, and how might we do things differently?
In their ‘Survive, Adapt and Renew: A response to Covid-19 Crisis for the Arts in Ireland’ the Arts Council recognised professional mentoring and coaching as providing ‘a higher skill base that will allow the arts sector to plan and adapt more flexibly and underpin the sustainability of the sector for the future.”
It’s not surprising that coaching would be mentioned in this way given that leadership training and strategic thinking models that sit at the core of professional coaching are now well-established pillars of professional development across many industries worldwide. Google famously adopted its internal coaching programme in 2010 and it has been frequently cited as one of the key reasons why Google is rated among the world’s best employers. A key takeaway from a review of the success of their coaching programme was reported in the following way:
“Models Matter: Coaching is more than just a conversation, the use of scientifically based coaching models have allowed for a systematic approach to developing our people internationally”.
An evidence-based model for understanding behavioural change used in coaching.
While mentoring has a long and established presence in artist development in Ireland, coaching has not been adopted in the same way until now. Breaking Ground set out with the aim of meeting challenges that artists are facing by utilising evidence-based coaching approaches to do so. What are those challenges and how might we address them?
Here’s how the Arts Council have expressed them in their key objectives, set out in their ‘Making Great Art Work Strategy 2016 – 2025’:
Key Objectives:
Ensure artists are supported at key stages of their careers: We will have supported artists to develop new and enhanced skills to support careers in their chosen art form.
Ensure a supportive working environment that addresses key points in the creative cycle: We will have supported artists to evolve their practice across and between disciplines
Improve the living and working conditions of artists: Sustainability, balanced career planning.
The document goes on to outline how it aims to deliver on these objectives as this: To deliver these supporting actions we will:
Introduce a new professional development programme to enable artists to advance their skills and develop their careers. Work with artists to support work that is collaborative, cross- disciplinary and open to evolving arts practice. To Work with local authorities and other partners to identify and provide the range of support that enable artists to sustain their careers. To Create opportunities nationally for resource sharing, peer support and learning support among artists.
In response to these objectives, the aims of the Breaking Ground: artists development project were set out as such:
• To increase personal agency, self-awareness and creative potential.
• To develop new and enhanced organisational & strategic skills to support productive & sustainable careers in the arts.
• To create a space for collaborative, cross-disciplinary, peer to peer learning & artistic development.
The project’s pilot course involved 16 artists from across the country meeting weekly for 90 mins of facilitated discussion, training and collaboration over 6 weeks. In between each session participants received prompts and exercises to help them dig deeper into the concepts explored and to encourage integrating them into their practice as their project progressed. Each artist received one hour of professional individual coaching on whatever aspect of their career or professional development they felt would be most useful to explore. The sessions covered topics such as: interpersonal communication, career planning and management, solution-focused approaches to professional development, cognitive behavioural models for resilience and self-awareness, narrative and constructivist approaches to mapping personal and professional development, and the psychology and behavioural science behind developing a creative practice.
Post-project, the results gathered from feedback questionnaires showed an increase in the following areas across the board:
A feeling of increased influence over the progression of their career in the arts.
Having the knowledge & tools needed to make a career in the arts more sustainable.
Increased confidence in the ability to change & adapt quickly to professional obstacles.
Ability to expand their own creative & professional potential.
"I have much more confidence in my abilities as an artist. I also have to tools to focus on charting my career progression as well as a deeper understanding of my behaviour and why I do certain things in relation to my practice"
- Artist and Breaking Ground participant 2021
The one to one was a highlight. It allowed me for the first time, in a very long time, to take stock of what I am aiming to do, and the small changes that can allow that to happen.”
- Visual Artists and Breaking Ground participant 2021
So, what enables these kinds of changes? A helpful way to understand how this can be achieved is to unpick some fundamental differences between coaching and mentoring. To generalise, mentoring works principally from the perspective of ‘instructive learning’; the passing on of skills and advice from an expert to a student. Coaching, by comparison, works collaboratively through the principals of ‘transformative learning’; the building of awareness, self-trust and personal agency through shifts in perspective and by empowering individuals to access more of their own innate resourcefulness and creativity.
While both practices adopt elements of each others approach at times and have strong evidence-bases to them, they meet different needs and create different results. When it comes to needs of adaptation, renewal and thriving in quickly changing and unpredictable environments (like a freelance creative career), coaching has been specifically developed with these very challenges in mind. The feedback from respondents to the Breaking Ground project supports the effectiveness of taking a coaching approach to these challenges in particular:
“The problems I’m facing/obstacles I identify feel more manageable now. I have the tools to make them manageable and find a way over/through them”
- Theatre/Maker – Breaking Ground Participant 2021
“The practical tools & models have been most helpful as a way to give clarity, direction and help with adaptability”
- Drama Teacher, Actor, Director – Breaking Ground Participant 2021
Doing things differently sits at the core of what the science and art of coaching is about. It requires developing new skills, capacities and adopting new approaches to old problems. Doing so as a sector will require more of us to explore and adopt new approaches too, at every level. While coaching isn’t a panacea for solving all the challenges facing artists, it’s clearly a powerful and impactful tool for doing so. Doing things differently involves seeing things differently first and adopting a coaching approach is an opportunity for us to do exactly that.
“The focus on the power we have over our thoughts and perceptions, and how reflecting on the origins of our usual patterns of thought or behaviour can also give us the power to affect change. It was also great to be in conversation with creatives from all different disciplines, and that really helped broaden my own understanding and empathy towards myself, realising that most people (no matter what discipline) were facing very similar challenges”
-Theatre Maker
“Thank you, it was an excellent course and I would highly recommend to any artist.”
- Visual Artist
I’d like to express my gratitude and admiration to Garter Lane Arts Centre and to the 16 artists who joined me on the first Breaking Ground project for their courage in adopting new approaches to artist development.